Back on November 1st, we bought a grabber from our local hardware store and took our 5-gallon bucket out for a walk around our neighborhood. We’d grown tired of the abundance of trash in our neighborhood and decided that we had to take personal responsibility for it, or we’d grow angrier being confronted with it every day.
Starting on the 1-mile loop, we walk a couple of times a day I thought we might pick up about 10 gallons of trash, but I was surprised by the reality of the situation. We had grown so accustomed to seeing the trash that much of it had become invisible. The statistics of exactly what has been collected boggle my mind. While we expanded our pick-up zone to a small area around the intersection we live next to, the majority of our new roles as trash collectors/de-ghettoization crew are focused on our walking route.
Here are the statistics so far:
- 150 gallons or 30 buckets of often overflowing trash
- 150-300 pounds is the estimated weight of our haul
- 21 miles we’ve walked in our effort to pick all of this up
- Four syringes
- Six shopping carts returned to our nearby grocery store
- One tire with one more that we still have to roll to a trash bin
- One hubcap
- Two bullet casings
- $5.31 in cash
- countless cigarette butts
- hundreds of Halloween candy wrappers – consider the dates we’ve been doing this
- probably a couple of hundred straws
- dozen of plastic bags
- various clothes, towels, shoes, work gloves, and rubber gloves
We refuse to pick up dog waste, though there is plenty.
My wish is for more people to go to their local hardware store and spend the $10-$20 for a picker/grabber and another $4 for a 5-gallon bucket and get out on their streets and start picking up the eyesores. Caroline and I will maintain this over the winter while we can still walk the streets of Phoenix before the heat prevents us from venturing outside for longer periods of time. Hmmm, this makes me think I should write to the CEO of Home Depot and ask them to partner with us on just such a project.